


These things you know (These things you fear)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Hopeful Ending, Introspection, M/M, POV Second Person, Steve McGarrett Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 12:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20210035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “I love you,” you say.“I love you too,” he says, speaking a completely different language.





	These things you know (These things you fear)

**Author's Note:**

> This is, uh, a little different. I know I’ve said that before, but this is differently different, in the sense that experimental (for me, anyway) might be a good word for it. It’s not poetry, but they might bump into each other at Christmas, when the extended family gathers.
> 
> It’s also very angsty, or at the very least attempts to be. I keep saying my writing is all fluff all the time and then this kind of thing happens, so maybe it’s not all fluff _all_ the time. (It mostly is, though. Just not this time.)

**1.**

You are not a bad man. You know this.

You’re in love with him. You know this, too.

You shouldn’t be. That’s the third thing you know.

*

**2.**

There’s North Korea, to start with. Then there’s Afghanistan and Hawaii and Colombia and a virus on a boat and a bullet in a quarantine room and it’s not always him saving you, except it is, because it always is, even when to all the world and him included it looks like you’re the one saving him. That’s not true. You’re saving yourself, at best. Keeping him alive is an egotistical act of pure self-preservation and it astounds you that you haven’t been called out for it yet. 

Someday soon, someone is bound to notice.

*

**3.**

You used to love her. It used to be good. Her body was soft and feminine and open to you, and it’s still most and possibly all of those things, but it’s not what you want anymore.

You wish you could flip a switch and go back. Soft and feminine was so much easier to explain to the world. The ground under your feet felt so much steadier when you didn’t have to fight a battle with the hateful things your mind has soaked up, just to be allowed to possibly explore what your heart wants. It’s an organ that scares you enough at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

Except when he’s with you. Then they are.

*

**4.**

You cobbled together this team, this tiny ohana, this surrogate crime-fighting family.

He’s the one who holds it together, almost singlehandedly.

*

**5.**

He calls you babe. His touch is easy and certain of its welcome. He trusts you with his kids. He comes for you, every single time. He hugs you, he has your back, and he makes you laugh. He calls you an idiot and then makes you dinner.

You wonder, frequently, how anyone who meets him manages not to fall for him like a jumper without a parachute. You really are an idiot, but you’re also babe and Neanderthal and uncle Steve, so it’s worth it, even if it’s inevitable that the landing will break every single bone in your body at least twice.

*

**6.**

“I love you,” you say.

“I love you too,” he says, speaking a completely different language.

“I love you,” you try again.

“I know you do,” he says, even though he doesn’t, because he can’t, because you’ve never told him.

“I love you,” you insist.

He doesn’t say anything but he looks at you for a long time, like you’re breaking his heart. 

*

**7.**

You are so weary of fighting. It’s what you’re good at, but that and what you want to be good at are two roads diverging in a wood. Right is building an explosive from household items, left is making his kids feel safe. Right is hitting your target from a half mile distance with only a sniper rifle and your steady hands to guide you, left is being able to sleep at night. Right is standing tall in the face of whatever horror the world decides to throw at you next and never flinch, left is allowing yourself the unthinkable vulnerability of breaking down, sobbing, in his arms.

Of course, you made your choice long ago. You’re so far down that path there is no turning back and you would do well to remember that. Maybe you would stumble less if you could just stop looking over your own shoulder.

*

**8.**

You’re used to waking up to darkness, scream stuck in your throat. For your mom never to get in that car; for that boy not to raise his weapon at you; for Freddie not to force you to go on without him. You won’t admit it, but your subconscious is a minefield of things that can warp a human mind. Every traumatic thing that has happened to you left shards embedded deep in your brain tissue after the explosion and they’re old wounds and they’re new wounds and some are still bleeding but others you almost forget until they ache because the weather changes. A few are gangrenous and will probably poison your blood and kill you sooner or later, but you’ve made your peace with that, if anybody asks.

If anybody asks, you’re fine.

*

**9.**

You wonder what your father would have thought if he had known about these feelings that get too big for your chest when you see your best friend smile. You’ll never know, of course, just like you’ll never really know your father.

You know that’s not your fault, but you can’t help but think─

Maybe if you’d been a better kid. Maybe if you’d been sweeter, more obedient, nicer to your sister. Maybe, then, your mother would never have left, and your father would never have spent the rest of his life searching for her murderer in vain, and they would have been a happy couple and your life would have been different. Maybe.

*

**10.**

Most days, when it gets bad, you want to move. Hit something, perhaps. Get rid of those thoughts inside by tiring out your physical form.

Some days you want to cry. Cry for all you’ve lost, for everyone who left, for things that are long past and things that will never be. You want to start crying and maybe not stop, maybe not ever, because you’re surrounded by the fucking Pacific Ocean but it feels like it’s inside of you, too, and once you start letting it out you won’t know how to stop.

So you don’t start. You go for a run instead. If you don’t feel better afterwards, you pretend you do.

*

**11.**

You have to consider, at some point, that it’s possible you just love people too aggressively for them to want to stay with you. You’ve been told all your life that you’re hardworking and stubborn and all or nothing. You fall too fast, you burn too bright, you break your own heart over and over and over again because you’ve never learned how not to. It frightens you, deeply and frequently, so why wouldn’t it scare everyone else?

*

**12.**

The consistency of your heart is akin to that of the fine sand on the beaches of Oahu. You can scoop it up and offer it to someone, but even if they grab at it with both hands, they will always drop it, in the end. It will seep through their fingers and spill all over the floor because it’s an amorphous blob except it’s not made of clean, fine sand, but of humps of rotting flesh with shiny black blood all over it, dripping, dripping, dripping.

No wonder people never seem to want it once they’ve gotten a good look.

*

**13.**

One unlucky day, he will see it in your eyes, this truly boundless affection, ever present and all overpowering like the sea, and he will recognize it for what it is. You can hide things, but badly, and almost never from him. You can’t lie to him at all. It’s a miracle he hasn’t caught you out way before now, maybe even in that very first week ─ he’s smart, he’s a detective, so he should have taken one look at you and how deep you’d sunk your claws into him, how hungry you are, and made a run for it.

For a while, he complained so loudly that you thought he would, eventually. Your hope for him is fading, these days.

*

**14.**

You think you know him, but the middle of the night always comes to remind you that you don’t. 

If you close your eyes, you can feel his skin and easy touch. You can see his eyes and the way his hands move. You can hear his voice and you can smell his sweat and aftershave and you can taste the bittersweet longing he leaves, unknowingly, in the back of your throat.

You can experience all this, but you can’t know him, because he doesn’t know you.

*

**15.**

It’s not exactly a secret that you’re broken. If nobody wants you, then maybe it’s because nobody should want you. They’ll cut themselves on the sharp edges. You shouldn’t get your hopes up, because there are only two ways out of this: he dies before he realizes any of this (you get him killed), or he leaves. If that happens, you’ll die. Rationally, you know that sounds overdramatic; from every other angle, you feel a bone deep certainty about it.

*

**16.**

You don’t think people won’t miss you. You’ve never thought that, not even in your lowest of moments. You know you’ll have a good funeral, and that people will tell stories about you and some of them will cry.

You also know they’ll get over it. You’re a skillset, and a rapidly aging one at that, and you can be replaced.

*

**17.**

No man is an island, but you already live on one, so why the hell not try to imitate it. It’s easier than trying to build boats.

The irony, of course, is that he keeps doing just that, even though he’s deathly afraid of open water. You can’t understand it. You rarely truly understand anything about him.

*

**18.**

When he finally kisses you, he does it like it’s easy. You freeze.

He retreats, awkwardly.

*

**19.**

It’s not that you don’t want to. It’s that you can’t. Your brain won’t let you; society won’t let you; your heart won’t let you; your own damn job wouldn’t have let you not too long ago. More importantly, _he_ shouldn’t let you, so you can’t let him.

*

**20.**

He tries to apologize. You snap at him.

He leaves.

*

**21.**

It’s not that it’s unexpected. Everyone leaves.

You just got used to having him, you suppose. 

It seemed so nice ─ the one exception to the rule.

*

**22.**

You have lists of people you’ve disappointed. Their faces, silent and judging, float in your dreams.

Those nights are usually peaceful, at least, even if you sometimes wake with drops of Pacific in your eyes. These days it happens more than usual.

*

**23.**

“Jesus, _Steve_,” he says, when you wake him, banging on his door in the middle of the night, absolutely shitfaced. You swear you can hear something shatter.

Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s your last shred of dignity.

As he’s helping you into his home, even though you both know you’ll probably puke all over everything, he tells you, furious but worried in that way only he can pull off, “Maybe it’s me. You ever consider that, huh?”

Until very recently, you had not.

*

**24.**

But here’s what drove you to strive for alcohol poisoning: maybe you were wrong. Maybe you, broken, are still enough. Maybe what feels greedy to you is oddly similar to what’s good for him and vice versa, and maybe it’s worth figuring that out, and maybe not giving it a shot and never knowing would be infinitely worse, despite anything the world could throw at you for opening yourself up to that kind of vulnerability. He’s the best man you know and he stuck around this long, so is it really too much to hope for that he might be around tomorrow, and the day after, and the one after that? Is it too much to hope for that again, and again, and again?

Maybe.

But maybe not, because when you spill your heart and guts and liquid dinner all over his floor, he finds a fucking mop and gets to work, and you’re not even surprised. “Shut up and sit your ass back down,” he barks, when you try to help him. That doesn’t surprise you, either, because you’d do the same for him and he knows that.

So the problem, the real one, isn’t whether he knows you or not. The problem is whether you trust him enough to let him.

*

**<strike>25.</strike>**

**1.**

You are not a bad man. You know this.

You’re in love with him. He knows this, too.

He’s in love with you too, and that’s probably okay. That’s what you don’t know yet, but what you’ll commit yourself to learning for the rest of your life, if he wants you. (And it looks like he might want you.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This was an odd one for me, so I would love to hear your opinion on this. ❤
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
